Spread of the Industrial Revolution to 1900

Spread of the Industrial Revolution to 1900

Lecture 42

What made the Modern Revolution so different is that instead of dying away like this, the process of innovation continued and spread around the entire world—and it’s still continuing today, more than two centuries later.

Within just two centuries industrialization had transformed the entire world. No earlier transformation in human history had been so rapid or so far-reaching. This lecture describes the impact of industrialization before 1900. There were four main waves of change before 1900. The rst wave began in the late 18th century. It mainly affected Britain and the western edge of Europe. New technologies included a more productive Agrarian sector, improved steam engines, the mechanization of textile production, and increased production of coal and iron.

The second wave took place early in the 19th century. Innovation accelerated in many parts of western Europe, and also along the eastern seaboard of the newly independent U.S. Technological changes included the increased use of steam engines in manufacturing and the spread of railways and steamships. Steam transportation sped up commercial exchanges and cut transportation costs, which stimulated commerce and manufacturing, particularly in large countries such as the U.S. or Canada, where cheaper land transport had a revolutionary impact on commerce in general.

The third wave dominated the middle decades of the 19th century. Industrialization accelerated within Europe, particularly within Germany (now united economically within a common custom zone, the Zollverein) and in the eastern U.S. Technological innovations included the industrial production of chemicals (such as dyes and arti cial fertilizers), steel-making (with the introduction of the Bessemer process), and the industrial use of electricity. Domestic lighting revolutionized patterns of work and leisure by lighting up the night. Railways, and new and more powerful weapons such as machine guns, revolutionized warfare. The American Civil War was the rst major war of the industrial era. The telegraph ( rst introduced in 1837)

and telephone (invented in 1876) revolutionized communications. In 1901, Guglielmo Marconi sent the rst wireless signal across the Atlantic.

A fourth wave of innovation dominated the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Industrialization took off in Russia and Japan, and spread westward within the United States. The oil age launched a second phase of the fossil fuels revolution, with the invention of the internal combustion engine. The Wright brothers ew the rst powered heavierthan-air plane in 1903. In 1913, Henry Ford produced the rst Model T Ford in 1913, pioneering mass production for a new mass consumer market.

Increasing productivity transformed the role and power of governments. Governments acquired new forms of power but also faced new and more complex challenges.

War was a major driver of change. With increasing production, states had to become more effective at mobilizing national resources of both manpower and materials. The armies of revolutionary France pioneered in the challenge of raising large citizen armies using the appeal of nationalism. But nationalism meant giving citizens a greater sense of ownership of society: a change achieved, in part, through democratic processes such as elections. To mobilize support from populations that were becoming more mobile, more urbanized, and better educated, governments had to provide new services such as policing, health services, and mass education, which few Agrarian- era states had offered. The power of modern governments depended more and more on economic growth, so they increasingly became economic managers, concerned with creating environments in which commerce could ourish.

Marchese Guglielmo Marconi sent the rst wireless transmission across the Atlantic in 1901.

Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division, LC-USZ62-77563.

The role and scope of government inevitably increased in societies in which most people were wage earners. This is because whereas peasants were largely self-suf cient, wage earners depend on the maintenance of markets, on education, and on the maintenance of law and order within rapidly growing towns. Inevitably, this meant that governments became more involved in the day-to-day lives of most of their citizens.

In short, the rules of political success had changed. Larger, more mobile, and better-educated societies had to be managed rather than simply coerced. In the Atlantic hub zone, the beginnings of these changes were already evident in the “democratic revolutions” of the late 18th and early 19th centuries.

While modern states have become more democratic, their power to coerce has also increased. Industrialization magni ed the military power of states by enabling them to transport soldiers and weapons larger distances, and by increasing the destructiveness of weaponry. Their increased military power was apparent in the astonishing speed with which, in the late 19th century, governments from the new Atlantic hub region conquered much of Africa, Asia, and the Americas.

Cultural life and popular lifeways were transformed. Everywhere, peasants slowly turned into wage earners as they were squeezed off the land by more ef cient commercial farmers. Because of the variety of activities for which they had to be prepared, wage earners needed education—so, beginning in France and Germany early in the 19th century, governments began to introduce systems of mass education.

Elite culture was transformed, particularly by science. The rst industrial science laboratories were created in Germany in the middle of the 19th century. As the economic, technological, and military importance of science rose, it challenged the traditional role of ancient religious traditions in education and culture by offering new materialistic accounts of the Universe that offered little room for traditional deities.

Increasing productivity transformed the role and power of governments.

Growth in industrializing regions was accompanied by sometimes catastrophic decline elsewhere. As productivity rose in the new hub regions, regional differentials in wealth and power widened. The once awesome power of ancient tribute-taking empires evaporated. China’s share of global production fell from 33% in 1800 to 6% in 1900, and in the 1840s, British gunboats forced China to trade in opium with the remarkably hypocritical argument that they were defending free trade. China was then forced to accept humiliating controls on its foreign trade. By 1900, states from the new hub regions dominated much of the world, directly or indirectly.

This sudden transformation depended in part on new industrial weaponry. The rst successful machine gun, the Gatling gun, was used in the later stages of the American Civil War. It could re 1,000 rounds a minute. The Maxim gun, the rst machine gun to use a belt feed, was invented in 1884 and used by British troops in the Matabele war in 1893–1894. Hilaire Belloc wrote, with vicious irony:

Whatever happens We have got The Maxim gun And they have not.

—(Belloc, The Modern Traveler)

The vast regional differences in wealth and power that are familiar today rst appeared in the late 19th century. Mike Davis has shown that it was in the late 19th century, for the rst time, that differences in living standards between different parts of the world began to widen sharply. This was when the “third world” was born (Christian, Maps of Time, pp. 435–36).

This lecture has traced how the Modern Revolution spread around the world, transforming governments and cultures as well as economies. It also showed how industrialization created new regional disparities in wealth and power. Would these changes continue? Yes, and they would even accelerate in the 20th century.

Essential Reading

Supplementary Reading

Questions to Consider

Christian, Maps of Time, chap. 13.

Bayly, The Birth of the Modern World. Davis, Late Victorian Holocausts. Headrick, “Technological Change.”

1. What were the main achievements of the rst four “waves” of global industrialization?

2. Why was global industrialization so damaging to many societies outside the new Atlantic hub zone?